Deep End(ancy)
Talk
about 'spooky'. The author of pool (no water) –
apparently intentionally spelt in lower case - Mark Ravenhill,
has just written in The Guardian about the growing fascination
he notices for intimate theatre spaces. For the Australian premiere
of the play Red Stitch have reduced their already intimate playing
space into roughly a quarter its normal size.
The original production was an elaborately staged
piece of physical theatre. This Red Stitch production concentrates
the narrative and action into an impossibly tight acting space
but brings with that a concentration on the text that wrings every
possible meaning and suggestion inherent in the script. The compact
story involves a tightly knit group of artists, one of which has
become an international success whose every pose and conceit lauded
by the art world. The less fortunate are invited to her luxurious
home with its monstrous outdoor pool. Re-living older and happier
times when their squalor was mutual they go skinny dipping and
the first to dive in is their host. But the pool is empty and
she is left crippled and in a coma. As the story unfolds the friends
quickly overcome their shock and try to make her accident into
an artwork only to see her recover and propose her own artwork
from the accident and recovery. Was it her plan from the start
or is her miraculous recovery and discovery of their selfish project
more than their jealousy and conceit can endure?
In his programme note for the 2006 premiere, Ravenhill
claimed some inspiration from Nan Goldin’s photographs of
her "bohemian, drug addled, multi-sexual friends” in
creating an artist character who turned her life into an artwork
[Golden had used her battered self as an art object]. The London
production combined a very physical, almost choreographed, element
blurring to some extent the boundaries between performance as
art and performance as theatre. In this very minimal realisation
of the text it still draws out as levels of meaning as its predecessor.
The four artist friends are an obvious parody of the modern bohemian
artist, the clothes, attitudes and absinthe and opium that fuelled
the creative spirit of the bohemian of the past is replaced by
the chic pretensions and unspecified drugs of the present. Ravenhill
even relegates them to a ‘Bohemian Quarter’ to hang
out in and, like the laundresses, factory hands and social detritus
that inspired the social content of modern art a century ago,
these nouveau bohemian create murals for heroin babies and the
like. They are self absorbed, unlikeable people who spend the
duration of the play struggling in the limited confines of the
set, a cramped space, tiled like a swimming pool and rendered
in shiny black. Those confines parallel, not just their limited
talent, but their limited humanity. It also acts as the tiny world
of their own self importance. Although cramped and lit with a
cheap and artificial fluorescent light of the cheap and artificial
quartet they would rather stay cocooned in what fittingly looks
like a toilet cubicle.
Ravenhill’s text, like that of Martin Crimp’s
Attempts’ on Her Life, does not allocate specific
lines to any actor and has no stage or scenic directions. It is
given here by for actors and in the restricting space creates
an opposite physical theatre to the sprawling one of the original
but these new limitations pertinently reflect the limitations
of the characters as artists and people as much as it creates
a picture of the limitless strength, creativity and success of
their unseen friend’s house, pool, hospital room and never-ending
success. Their actions are huddled and cringing and they stare
out of the fourth wall of their box at the world beyond but never
care to step out of it.
Unlike the ambiguous text of ‘Attempts’
Ravenhill’s has a ‘plot’ and, despite its brevity,
gives scathingly thorough accounts of the four friends and, through
their perceptions, thorough accounts of their rival and even her
pool-boy, personal trainer and, when she is hospitalised, her
nurse Miguel. In his breakthrough and now most famous play Shopping
and F***ing -the censored version of the title adding to
its notoriety - Ravenhill included a iconic depiction of disenfranchised
gay youth. Even though Ravenhill claims his "pink fountain
pen has run dry" and he is "happy never to write another
gay character again" the actors intuit enough subtext to
create straight and gay characters. Dion Mills, for example, drooling
in the direction of the unseen pool boy as they debate if he is
or was a porn star or whether he or the trainer shag their employer
or vice versa. As the story draws to close and the four friends
turn away from the reality check their famous friend gives them
a shaft of decency shines on them. Emotional commitment and a
child comes to Melissa Chambers' previously vain female member
of the gang as they re-arrange their narrow lives in an amoral
epilogue. Throughout the play the four actors use Ravenhill's
satirical text as weapons of mass character destruction in this
comedy about the ageless theme of envy among friends and very
much in the great tradition of English satire.
Michael Magnusson
To read more of Michael Mangusson's theatre reviews,
check out his blog at
On Stage (and walls) Melbourne.
